This invention concerns dinghies, which term includes, of course, small boats both for utilitarian purposes as well as for pleasure use.
A major difficulty with the use of a dinghy for example for disembarking from and obtaining access to a boat or ship riding at anchor, or for pleasure or other purposes, lies in the handling of the dinghy, particularly whilst on land. For example, an owner or user of a launch which may be generally anchored just off shore when not in use may need provision for a dinghy to remain at or to be stored at some location above high water mark, and in order to make use of it, it will be necessary to manoeuvre the same down to the water. If, for example, he is proposing to go out on a long trip, there is the additional problem of transporting not just the dinghy, but also of provisions, stores and equipment, as well as any accessories, such as oars, baling equipment, inflation pump, and possibly an outboard engine and fuel, and so on which may be necessary for the use of the dinghy. On the western coasts of the British Isles, the average difference in height between low and high tides is approximately twenty feet (i.e. in excess of six meters) and this can represent a considerable distance over the shore, often amounting to some hundreds of meters and in the case, for example, of shallow regions such as at Southport on the Lancashire coast, as much as a kilometer or two. It is therefore often necessary for a dinghy user, upon coming in to shore, to manhandle the dinghy, sometimes over a substantial distance, to get it above the high water mark, and then subsequently when he requires to use it again he has to get the craft back down to the water, together perhaps with many of the appurtenances already referred to.
Even a relatively-small conventional dinghy may require two people to move it about on land, under normal practical circumstances. Of course, a light craft may be manoeuvred with varying degrees of difficulty by one person, especially if it is mounted on a wheeled trolley or trailer, but even this does not provide an ideal solution to the problem, because the dinghy itself has to be unloaded from or loaded onto the trolley or trailer, as may be necessary, and as an additional item may have to be moved about independently of the dinghy. Thus, for instance, where a trolley or trailer is used to move a dinghy from above the high water mark down to the water's edge, this trolley or trailer may have to be taken back to its starting position above the high water mark, during which time the dinghy has to be left in such a place as to ensure that it is still there upon the user's return after disposing of the trolley or trailer. Moreover, if the disposal of the trolley or trailer should take any significant time, the user may find, upon his return either that the dinghy has been beached due to ebb of the tide, in which case it has to be manhandled once again to get it into the water, or that the tide has come in and the dinghy is floating away from the water's edge, in which case the user may not be able to avoid getting wet when boarding the dinghy.
Because of these difficulties in handling dinghies on shore, slipways or sharply shelving beaches are often regarded as being the most suitable places for launching dinghies, but of course these may not be conveniently available. The ideal solution, of course, is to make use of a marina but they are not universally available and even where they are their use may be expensive.